Smoothwall Crippling with >30 connections

[farquea]

We were offered a server installed with Smoothwall running Network Guardian by our LEA but in the end we just had it installed on our own hardware.

 

We also have an ISA server set up which acts as a firewall and is the final point of contact before traffic goes out of the school. If we have everyone in the school going through Smoothwall for filtering then the internet just dies for everyone. But with everyone going through the ISA everything runs fine as it is so its clearly something to do with the Smoothwall server.

 

It was setup by a County technician who set up every other schools server so its not been set up any different, i asked if we should have 2 nics assigned to it rather than the 1 its currently using but was told that isnt the problem as its not being used as a firewall as we have the ISA to do that.

 

The hardware is up to the job as well and the stress on CPU and RAM is minimal when you look at the Smoothwall diagnostics.

 

The company employed to handle support calls for Smoothwall dont seem to have any answers for why its not working properly and im all out too. So i wondered if anyone else had seen any kind of similar problems like this or could offer any advice as currently we have all staff going through ISA and students only on Smoothwall and it just about works but that is with year 11's no longer in school so we will need a solution by the start of next academic year.

 

Any ideas?

[tom_newton]

Give us a call direct. If you are talking about the people I think you are talking about they should be coming to us for answers, and getting these things sorted. If that's not happening, i'd like to know about it, so we can sort things.

 

I may be hard to catch tomorrow - so if you can't get me on my direct line, try 0113 3874181 and get hold of RobF. We will make sure you get through to someone in tech support and we will get this fixed.

[kmount]

Give us a call direct. If you are talking about the people I think you are talking about they should be coming to us for answers, and getting these things sorted. If that's not happening, i'd like to know about it, so we can sort things.

 

I may be hard to catch tomorrow - so if you can't get me on my direct line, try 0113 3874181 and get hold of RobF. We will make sure you get through to someone in tech support and we will get this fixed.

 

Top quality as always Tom.

[sjatkn]

We also have an ISA server set up which acts as a firewall and is the final point of contact before traffic goes out of the school. If we have everyone in the school going through Smoothwall for filtering then the internet just dies for everyone. But with everyone going through the ISA everything runs fine as it is so its clearly something to do with the Smoothwall server.

 

It sounds like you have a similar setup to mine. I don't remember the exact errors or terminology as it was about 3 weeks ago. On the ISA server I noticed several alerts saying something along the lines of the connection limit has been exceeded. In my set up each connection to the server was limited to a reasonable number assuming only one user on each IP address, which was the case when we used ISA as the proxy server. The SmoothWall server was trying to make significantly more connections as it was the proxy for hundreds of users. Unfortunately I don't remember where I changed the limit, but as soon as I changed it to unlimited for the SmoothWall server our problems vanished. I used the help file to tell me where to make the change in rates.

 

Deployment Recommendations for Connection Limits in ISA Server 2004 may also be helpful.